After review, the NCAA has announced it will lift the APR penalty it imposed on the Oklahoma State football team earlier this year.
According to ESPN, a football player from the 1990s, who just recently graduated, brought down the Cowboys' Academic Progress Rate (APR) just enough to incur a penalty. Originally lowered to 18 hours a week, the Cowboys will now have their full 20 hours of practice per week for the upcoming season.
Oklahoma State was not pleased with the NCAA penalty in the first place because their score totaled 929.41, just 0.09 points shy of 929.5, which gets rounded up to the minimum requirement of 930. Oklahoma State's athletic department then brought up the adverse effect the former player had on the team.
"We are very thankful for the cooperation of the NCAA staff during this process and we appreciate their focus on the accuracy of the data. We are also thankful that we received a speedy resolution," Mike Holder, the school's athletic director, said in a press release. "In the long term, this process will be a positive thing for our athletic department because nothing is more important to us than playing by the rules and graduating our student-athletes. This has caused us to re-examine how we monitor the APR and make some positive changes."
The NCAA's original penalty was the loss of four hours of practice per week, ESPN reported, which was the equivalent of one session every week. One month from Wednesday, the Oklahoma State Cowboys are set to start their season against the Florida State Seminoles, college football's reigning National Champions.
"Throughout this process the NCAA has been committed to having complete and accurate data," Kevin Fite, Oklahoma State's senior associate athletic director for compliance, said in the release. "We were provided a great deal of assistance in ensuring the information we were evaluated on accurately reflected our football team's academic performance, based on APR standards.
"When the additional point was discovered earlier this summer, the NCAA staff promptly re-evaluated our situation and added the point, which took us out of the penalty range."
